THE BRAVEST BOAT
279
tainsides of forests that never grew again, or by trees that made way
for grinning regiments of villas
in
the background of "our expanding
and fair city," mills that shook the very earth with their tumult, filling
the windy
air
with their sound as of a wailing and gnashing of
teeth: all these curious achievements of man, together creating as
we say "the jewel of the Pacific," went as though down a great in–
cline to a harbor more spectacular then Rio de Janeiro and San Fran–
cisco put together, with deep-sea freighters moored at every angle
for miles in the roadstead, but to whose heroic prospect nearly the
only human dwellings visible on this side of the water that had any
air of belonging, or in which their inhabitants could be said any
longer to participate, were, paradoxically, a few lowly little self-built
shacks and floathouses, that might have been driven out of the city
altogether, down to the water's edge into the sea itself, where they
stood on piles, like fishermen's huts (which several of them appar–
ently were), or on rollers, some dark and tumbledown, others
freshly and prettily painted, these last quite evidently built or placed
with some human need for beauty in mind, even if under the per–
manent threat of eviction, and all standing, even the most sombre,
with their fluted tin chimneys smoking here and there like toy
tramp steamers, as though in defiance of the town, before eternity.
In Enochvilleport itself some ghastly-colored neon signs had long
since been going through their unctuous twitchings and gesticulations
that nostalgia and love transforms into a poetry of longing: more
happily one began to flicker: PALOMAR, LOUIS ARMSTRONG AND
HIS ORCHESTRA. A huge new gray dead hotel that at sea might
be a landmark of romance, belched smoke out of its turreted
haunted-looking roof, as if it had caught fire, and beyond that all
the lamps were blazing within the grim courtyard of the law courts,
equally at sea a trysting place of the heart, outside which one of the
stone lions having recently been blown up was covered reverently
with a white cloth, and inside which for a month a group of stain–
less citizens had been trying a sixteen-year-old boy for murder.
Nearer the park the apron lights appeared on a sort of pebble–
dashed Y.M.C.A.-Hall-cum-variety theater saying TAMMUZ
The
Master Hypnotist, To-nite 8:30,
and running past this the tramlines,
down which another parkwise streetcar was approaching, could be
seen extending almost to the department store in whose show window
